Hello from sunny San Diego! We are in full swing here at Cisco Live US with 25,000 attendees from our Cisco community of customers and partners, showcasing how we are enabling the digital economy today and well into the future.

Chances are that if you know anything about Cisco, you know we’re the networking leader and a major player in the wireless world. But did you know that beyond wireless networking, Cisco has mobility solutions for every step of the mobile journey – from wireless infrastructure to personalized end user experiences? In fact, Mobility is leading the way as we all leap into the digital era and changing the way we live, play, work, and learn.

If you are at Cisco Live this week, I hope you had a chance to get a glimpse of how Cisco Mobility solutions can transform your workstyles and lifestyles. At the Future of the Network – Innovation Talk, you may have seen how mobility transforms customer and workforce experiences, as well as provides powerful insights to organizations to make smarter and decisions. A fun demo that involved the audience Read More »

The rapid expansion of connected devices is a double-edged sword for businesses. On one hand, mobility, cloud, and BYOD innovations enable unprecedented flexibility, collaboration, and ease of access for employees. Fifty percent of employers will adopt BYOD policies by 2017, and 90 percent of American workers are already using their own smartphones for work.[1] But this flexibility comes with a cost: as endpoints multiply, controlling network access becomes increasingly difficult. The vast majority – 90 percent – of organizations lack full awareness of all of the devices accessing their network.[2] At the same time, insiders perpetrate 34 percent of all cybercrimes highlighting the key role of identity access management in maintaining a strong cybersecurity posture.[3]

The Digital Economy and the Internet of Everything means everything is now connected. Digitization is fundamentally transforming how we conduct business. It creates new opportunities to develop services and engage with employees, partners, and customers. It’s important to understand that digitization is also an opportunity for the hacking community, presenting new services, information, data, devices, and network traffic as attack targets. To take full advantage of the digitization opportunity, security must be everywhere, embedded into and across the extended network – from the data center to the mobile endpoints and onto the factory floor.

Today, Cisco is announcing enhanced and embedded security solutions across the extended network and into the intelligent network infrastructure. These solutions extend security capabilities to more control points than ever before with Cisco FirePOWER, Cisco Cloud Web Security or Cisco Advanced Malware Protection. This is highlighted in Scott Harrell’s blog. We are also transforming the Cisco network into two roles: as a sensor and as an enforcer of security.

The role of the Network as a Sensor The network provides broad and deep visibility into network traffic flow patterns and rich threat intelligence information that allows more rapid identification of security threats. Cisco IOS NetFlow is at the heart of the network as a sensor, capturing comprehensive network flow data. You can think of NetFlow as analogous to the detail you get in your monthly cellular phone bill. It tells you who talked to whom, for every device and user, for how long, and what amount of data was transferred – it’s metadata for your network traffic.

Visibility to network traffic through NetFlow is critical for security, as it serves as a valuable tool to identify anomalous traffic on your network. Watching NetFlow, we gain an understanding of the baseline traffic on the network, and can alert on traffic that is out of the ordinary. The network is generating NetFlow data from across the enterprise network all the way down to the virtual machines in the data center. This gives us visibility across the entire network, from the furthest branch office down to the east-west traffic in the data center. Read More »

In one of my previous posts, I noted how Network Access Control (NAC) platforms have started evolving into more visibility-focused and context-aware platforms in the face of major business trends such as enterprise mobility, the migration of resources to the cloud, and the ubiquitous Internet of Everything. Consequently, “new NAC” technology has quietly transformed from a complicated set of controls – outdated in a more mobile world – into a powerful business enabler for enterprises.

The Cisco Visual Networking Index (VNI) forecasts that over fifty billion new connected devices will hit networks by the year 2020. With this massive proliferation of network-enabled devices firmly in mind, I am proud to announce that the latest version of the market-leading Cisco Identity Services Engine (ISE) is now available. Cisco Identity Services Engine builds upon the solid foundation of our last release to round out the current platform by focusing on expanding the ISE partner ecosystem with new, exciting categories for context-aware security as well as advancing endpoint security capabilities.

As the Cisco 2015 Annual Security Report shows, current security approaches aren’t sufficient. Attackers are shifting methods and becoming more sophisticated in their approaches, users are unwittingly complicit enablers, and defenders struggle to keep up with all of these things. It is time for defenders to take a different approach to security that not only outwits attackers but also makes security a competitive advantage that enables business growth.

By taking a threat-centric and operational approach to security, organizations can reduce complexity and fragmentation, while providing superior visibility, continuous control, and advanced threat protection across the extended network and the entire attack continuum.

Using Cisco technology, this approach is enabled by broad visibility for superior intelligence across the extended network, where all the solutions a customer deploys communicate with each other. Organizations using siloed solutions will have holes in their security. Siloed solutions do not provide full protection since they do not communicate with one another, thus leaving security gaps and the inability to create actionable intelligence.

Cisco can provide a holistic solution to this problem by reducing the attack surface and extending protection across the network – before, during and after attacks.

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